SharePoint archiving and end user experience
Most organizations do see the benefit of SharePoint archiving to not only keep the excessive growth of their SharePoint farm in line, but also to ensure that only relevant data remains in the system. What many SharePoint archiving offerings from other 3rd parties do is what many people expect archiving to do. You take the blob out of the SharePoint content database and replace it pretty much with a stub, which sounds like a very plausible and logical thing to do.
The big thing to understand though is that SharePoint is a different animal. People use SharePoint differently than email and the way the data is structured is different than email. When you perform storage management on SharePoint you need to ensure that it is transparent to the end user .. not just leave a stub the click on. When I refer to transparent storage management I mean that it should be done without the user actually noticing any thing different. Simply removing the blob and replacing it with a stub might make SharePoint’s index think that the content is no longer there and remove the index data.
NearPoint for SharePoint leverages functionality available in SharePoint that allows us to perform full storage management on SharePoint while leaving the end user with the impression that the content actually still resides in SharePoint. Even though the content no longer resides on SharePoint, end users can still search on the document through SharePoint search and when they go to the location where they had stored the item, it still looks like it resides there, icon/date and size all intact. The better the transparency is for the end user the more successful your SharePoint archiving deployment is.
Tags: Email Archiving, end user, SharePoint, usabilitiy
